“You need to have your guys make a more thorough sweep of that building,” he said. “If that wall starts to come down — and it might — we want to make sure that there’s nobody in there.”
“I have a group going through there right now,” Hale replied. “You’d figure that with all these sirens a person would have to be deaf or dead not to get his ass out of that building.”
The security director’s walkie-talkie crackled. He turned away from the fire, bringing it to his ear. “Hale here. Go ahead.”
“Need… bod…” The words coming through kept breaking up.
“Repeat. Do you read me?”
“… bulances…”
The communication was from the men he had inside the Ways. Turning to a security guard and two firefighters standing by, he pointed to the building. “They need help in the Ways.”
The three men rushed toward the door.
The walkie-talkie came alive again. “… need ambulances…”
Hale shouted to the fire chief over the din. “Ambulances. They need help in there.”
As the fire chief called for the ambulances, Hale rushed toward the door himself. The smell of melting paint burned his lungs. His men could have been overcome with smoke. As he reached the door, one of the security guards who’d been inside stumbled out, clutching the walkie-talkie in his hand. He doubled over, retching as Hale bent over him.
“What is it?”
“They’re dead.”
“Who?”
“Brian and Hodges. Dead.” He looked wildly into Hale’s eyes. “Somebody fucking stabbed them.”
Hale straightened up, stunned by the words. It took couple of seconds for him to find his bearings. The names rushed through his mind. They weren’t on the detail clearing the building. They must have been in there earlier. He thought of the young men, their families, their children. They were stabbed?
Hale yanked open the door. The handle burned his hand, and he jerked backward, startled. Before he could go through the door, an ambulance screeched to a stop behind him and the EMTs leaped out. He held the door open with his foot as they scrambled through carrying tanks of air and stretchers.
Shouting cut through all the other noise, drawing Hale’s attention. Everyone was looking toward the pier, and two security guards were running in that direction. Hale turned to look.
The footbridge to Hartford was dangling from the pier, one end of it in the river. With no tugboats in sight, with no one visible on the bridge at the top of the fairwater, the submarine was backing away from the pier, operating under its own power.
Chapter 6
Amy would have crawled into one of the cabinet drawers to give him more room, but the narrow office had the maneuvering space of a coffin. There was nowhere to go. She managed to wedge herself sideways into a corner between a floor-to-ceiling cabinet and the paneled outboard bulkhead.
McCann attacked the door like a raging bull, but there was no moving the steel barrier. He’d shouted from the top of his lungs, but no one answered from the other side. Calling the control room over the intercom had produced no response, either.
Neither of them considered for a moment that his crew was pulling a prank on them. Amy had seen a masked man with a pistol in his hand reach into the room and grab the door handle. Before pulling the door shut, she’d seen another masked man behind him. She’d immediately told the commander what she’d seen.
“I’ll have every one of your sorry asses court-martialed,” McCann bellowed into the intercom before turning to where Amy was pinned against the wall.
His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He was over six feet tall, very wide across the shoulders. He exuded an explosive power, and his physical presence seemed to fill the small office space. His anger heightened the feeling. He appeared angry enough to break the entire submarine in two. Turning back to the intercom, he punched a button and held it down as he barked into the unit.
“Captain here. Code Red. Repeat…” He stopped, glancing at her and muttering. “The PA is down.”
Amy nodded. A phone hung on the wall, and he picked it up, listened, and slammed it back in the cradle. Whoever was responsible for this had taken down the communication system.
Her mind raced a hundred miles an hour as she tried to consider every possibility of what could be happening to them. Suddenly, in the middle of the confusion, the faces of Kaitlyn and Zack — her seven-year-old twins — came into sharp focus. Her neighbor Barbara was with them. She came over and stayed with the twins five nights a week, while Amy was working third shift. Most days, Amy got home before the two second-graders had to leave for school. Not today, though.
She’d known that she might be running late this morning, and Barbara was going to get the children ready and walk them to the bus stop. Still, what would happen when she didn’t show in the lunchroom? They knew Amy was scheduled for volunteer duty today. She’d never missed her turn before. The twins would know something was wrong. And what would happen when they took the bus home? No one would be there. Barbara had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. And Amy’s parents were not flying back from California until Wednesday. Where would the kids go if no one were there to meet them?
She shook her head as panic clawed its way into her throat. She felt chilled and feverish at the same time. Amy looked around the tight quarters before her eyes settled on Commander McCann. He was doing something on the PC.
“What do you think is happening?” Her voice sounded strained even to herself. She tried to bind a tight rope around her emotions. The last thing the sub captain needed right now was a hysterical woman on his hands.
“Someone, a group of people, are trying to take over my sub,” he said tensely, continuing to type away on the keyboard.
Amy forced herself to move away from the paneled wall. Walking on rubbery knees, she moved behind him, looking past his shoulder. He was trying to get into different networks. Every one of them seemed to be down.
“Do you mean… like a hijacking?” she asked, shivering.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
Amy didn’t want to distract him. She knew there was no one more familiar with the systems and operations of this sub than the man sitting before her.
“The network is shut down. From what I can tell UHF, HF, VLF, and ELF systems are locked down, too.”
She knew he was talking about frequency channels in the communications system.
He continued to mutter. “That’s against SUBSAFE rules and a dozen other regs.”
He stood up. Amy backed away quickly as he started opening the cabinets and drawers. He was looking for something.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked, feeling useless just watching.
“Do you have anything on you? Tools? A knife? Anything that we could use as a weapon?”
The joke around the shop had always been that if Amy ever fell in the water, she’d never surface. She tended to carry too many tools on her. If fact, the union had written formal complaints against her for carrying them. It didn’t stop her.
She patted her jacket pockets and started emptying them on the desk. A crimping tool, a pair of pliers, a wire cutter, a screwdriver that doubled as a voltage detector. She stripped off her blue coat and threw it aside, taking out a tape measure from the pocket of the vest she was wearing under it. There were also some cable straps and banding crimps. McCann wasn’t waiting for her to give him an inventory. He continued to search the drawers, pulling out anything that could be used as a sharp object or a tool and adding it to her pile.